On Blue's waters

If it is true that in some sense Silk and Hyacinth remain forever beside the goldfish pond at Ermine’s where I sought them, may not Seawrack and I live in the same sense in a certain dry cave among towering, moss-draped trees on the island that will always be “The Island” to me? I have said that I can be cruel because I know it for the truth; and I know too that the universe, the whorl of all whorls, can be much crueler. I hope it is not cruel enough to deprive even the smallest and most ghostly fragment of my being of the happiness that Seawrack and I know there.

There came a moment when I wanted to return to the sloop. We had seen no game and no sign of any; we were all tired, and Babbie, who had ranged ahead at first sniffing and snuffling here and there, lagged behind. What was worse (although I did not say it) was that I was not sure of the way back to the sloop; and I was afraid that we would have to strike the shore of the island wherever we could reach it, and try to follow it until we found the little bay to the north in which we had anchored. We were tired already, as I have said, and had not yet begun what might be a very long walk. It seemed more than possible that we would not be able to locate the sloop before shadelow.

Seawrack pointed to a ridge, not very distant but only just visible through the trees. “You wait here,” she said, “and let me go up there and see what’s on the other side. You and Babbie rest, and I’ll come right back.”

I told her that I would go with her, naturally, and took pains to lead the way.

“There’s so much sunshine,” she said as we climbed that final slope. “There can’t be any trees there. Not big ones like these.”

I told her it was probably a good-sized cliff, that we would see trees below it, and that we might have a fine view of the island and the sea around it. What we really saw when we topped the ridge was less dramatic but a great deal stranger.

- 8- THE END

It was a circular valley entirely free of the mature trees that had formed the forest of the mountain slopes, and filled instead with the bushes, vines, and saplings that had been absent there, green, lush, and saturated with an atmosphere of newness that I really cannot describe but was immediately conscious of. After hours of climbing through the airless antiquity of the forest, it was as though we had been awakened from the deepest of sleeps with a bucket of cold water.

Seawrack cried, “Oh! Look! Look!” and pressed herself against me. From her voice, she felt wonder and even awe; but she shook with fear, and at that moment, I was ignorant of the cause of all three.

“The walls, Horn. Their walls. Don’t you see them?”

I blinked and looked, then blinked again before I was able to make out one curving line of masonry practically submerged in the rising tide of leaves.

“I know places in the sea where there are walls like those,” Seawrack told me. Her voice was hushed. “ ‘Underwater’ is what you say.”

I started down, followed reluctantly by Seawrack and even more reluctantly by Babbie. “Human beings, people like you and me, people from the Whorl, can’t have built this. It’s too old.”

“No…”

“It was the Vanished People. It had to be. There’s a place near New Viron, but I don’t think it’s as old as this. And Sinew says he found an altar in the forest. I told you about that.” Answered only by silence, I glanced over my shoulder at Seawrack and received a fear-filled nod.

“Sinew’s altar was probably in a chapel of some kind originally, a shrine or something like that. This was a lot bigger, whatever it was.” I stopped walking, having nearly tripped over a line of crumbling glass not much higher than my ankle.

“You wanted to go back.” The fear had reached her voice. “So do I. Let’s go back right now.”

“In a minute.” The glass was deep blue, but seemed more transparent than the clearest glass from Three Rivers. I picked up a piece, feeling absurdly that it would show me the place as it had been hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years ago. It did not, but the valley I saw through that fragment of blue glass appeared more brightly sunlit than the one my naked eyes beheld.

“There’s nothing left here,” Seawrack murmured. “These are old, ruined, broken things nobody wants anymore, not even the trees.”

“Something kept trees from growing here for a long while,” I told her. “Some chemical they put in the ground, or maybe just a very solid, thick pavement underneath this soil. It can’t have been many years since it gave out. Look at these young trees. I can’t see even one that seems to be ten years old.” Silently, she shook her head.

“I’ve been trying to guess how this blue glass works. It’s as if it sees more light from the Short Sun than we do and shows it to us. Here, look.”

“I don’t want to.” Seawrack shook her lovely head again, stubbornly this time. “I don’t want to look at their trees, and I don’t want to look through their glass. Babbie and I and going back to your boat.”